Left in the Dark
by Mickleditch
Summary: There has to be a reason to go on. [Vietnam, POWs, references to torture]


Disclaimer: The A-Team and all characters belong to Stephen J Cannell and Universal Studios.

* * *

"Raid on Son Tay," Hannibal said.

The single, bare bulb that made sleep impossible when you first arrived, until sheer fatigue overwhelmed you to such a degree that you learned to drift in and out of something resembling the state, was behind his head. Face moved on the bunk, just enough that his silhouette shielded it for a little while. It was starting to rain; he could hear the first _ping pongs_ on the roof. Tin; in the summer it turned the room into a sweatbox. Worse when it rained, the air like the thick stink of an aquarium. The air that came through the two vents at the top of the wall reeked with the stagnant water from the rice paddies and the mulch of the jungle. Raw vegetation outside, sweat and shit inside. Sometimes you felt like your lungs were filling up; like you weren't breathing air, but a kind of soup.

Face couldn't read anything into Hannibal's expression. All of the prisoners there would clutch at anything that they could somehow convince themselves meant upcoming release. There were the ones with a theory that any improvement in rations - cubes of pressed bean curd, a bowl of sweet porridge - meant that the NVA were trying to improve their health before releasing them. Gaunt, jaundiced men almost got into fist fights, insisting that they were being fattened up.

You could turn anything you wanted into a reason that you weren't going to be there more than another month at the most. How they were the one thing that the NVA had to offer in exchange if they wanted to end the war. How any day now Johnson was going to start bombing again.

 _Face, Hannibal thinks he can tell that little rat guard something and get you another blanket, only you got to talk to him yourself and tell him how you're sick._

 _Got a note from this guy today, Faceman. He been in the cell next to Crazyman. He thinks they done with him. He gettin' out any day now._

You had to find some kind of incentive; some way of making yourself, or another guy, want to live. Just to get up and move about. Everybody put the effort in, when somebody was really low. Face moistened his lips. They were cracked. Ray had said something about when the body's dehydrated, it pulls fluid from the skin. Skin crumbled off of all of them constantly, like pale cheese.

"Prisoner extraction?"

The fine muscles around Hannibal's mouth twitched, faintly. "Four months after the V moved them out. Guess _military intelligence_ really is a contradiction in terms."

"How many gooks they get?"

"Fifty."

"Our side?"

"One busted ankle," Ray put in.

Face closed his eyes a minute. "Does Murdock know?" he said.

Hannibal nodded. "If he doesn't, he's going to. If I have to get them to throw me in solitary as well and tap it through five cells to him."

Hannibal had spent a month in solitary. A skinny little gook known as the Tick had come round to the rest of them every day, telling them that Hannibal had turned fink, that they were discussing the good treatment he'd get for selling his men out right now, until BA had finally stopped it by ramming the Tick's head against the wall. They beat him bloody for that, but the Tick's mouth had hurt worse than the bamboo canes. The V could always find out how to get under all of their skins, the thing each man couldn't stand hearing, what knocked them down just a little bit further.

It took them around two weeks from arrival to figure out that Face and Murdock would do and take pretty much anything rather than be separated, and once the gooks had that, they had a soft underbelly that they could slice into again and again. Sometimes they'd take one of them when they wanted something from the other one. Sometimes they'd take Murdock anyway, to try and get info out of him because he was a pilot. _Who were the members of your unit? What were your air tactics? When did you spy for the CIA?_ In between times they'd shut him in total darkness. When he came back, he'd lost track of what day it was. His bed had stocks at the end of it. When you were strapped down, you couldn't even try to get away from your own shit; you went on yourself.

Always: _We are your friends. We have no orders to kill you. Your conditions are bad now, but we will study them. When you see the errors in your thinking, you will get more food. When you have learned the truth, you will go back to your families._

Hunger took over your body and dominated your mind. Some guys made up fancy menus in their imagination. Food, always food, up to a point. Then, strangely, no appetite, because you hadn't the vitamins for it.

BA knew what they were all like about food. He'd started sneaking half of his meal - the watery green broth everybody called weeds, and the bread - into Face and Murdock's bowls because they were the sickest. It was laced with weevils and rat shit more often than it wasn't. They all ate that too.

BA was the biggest in the camp, a shining black mountain. He needed more fuel than the rest of them; needed a lot to survive. When his body fat melted away, it left him sinewy and athletic-looking, but eventually the muscle he was so proud of started to disappear too. When Murdock had realized what BA was doing, he'd refused to eat at all, and eventually Hannibal had made each of them eat one at a time, sitting in front of them and fixing an unrelenting eye on the spoon as it moved from bowl to mouth. Face had gotten bad dysentery by then, and Hannibal had brought the food over to the wooden boards they slept on and fed him himself, the same as he'd washed his clothes.

"Crazyman gonna be needing all of us when he gets back, Faceman. He gonna be needing you most."

"If they'd give me some iodine again," Ray said. "Just some iodine for the worst of it - and for the goddamned boils." He and Hannibal had counted over fifty between them, in the last half of this summer. When the lesions broke and the pus dried, it had glued their pajamas to them. Face hadn't liked his much, either. The iodine had stopped because a couple of guys at another camp had used some to darken their skin, so they'd look like Vietnamese, before they tried to escape.

Ray's kit used to have gauze, battle dressings, morphine syrettes. The medics could get busted for losing the morphine. Sometimes he'd hustle a bag of IV solution away from a local aid station. Now all he had was torn strips of black pajamas to bandage lacerations; half of the teapots of water they got each day to wash them. His temper got worse the more impotent the V left him, spat out into their faces, different from Hannibal's smarting off and Face's brutal silence. When they'd found out he was a medic, they made him work shifts at the treatment room. After he kicked a slop bucket over the feet of one of the guards, they beat Ray nearly as often as they did Murdock.

 _Hey, Doc! Hey, Doc! You fix yourself up after! You fix yourself up good!_

Ray had set Murdock's ribs with his fingertips a couple of times, when they'd brought Murdock back from interrogation. From time to time, the ribs would click out again, and Ray would reset them.

Murdock would look at Face across the room while he was doing it and smile gently. He looked like he was faraway a lot of the time. Sometimes Face would feel like he was losing his grip on Murdock, that he was slowly slipping through his fingers, and the more he tried to keep him there, the faster he slipped. When Face had thought he had no tears left, it was the only thing that still made him want to cry.

"What if they made him write it this time?" he said. "What if they wrote it and made him sign it?"

"Then we tell him it's okay," Hannibal said. There was a hard edge to his voice. "We tell him it's okay and he did good."

"It'd break him."

BA moved over to them, to the wooden pallet that served as their bunk. Some of the rooms had concrete blocks, instead. "He ain't gonna break. 'Cause if one of us breaks, we all do. So he ain't goin' nowhere and neither are you, or we all goin' down like dominoes, one after the other."

Maybe it wasn't the pain made people crack, Face thought. Or maybe it was a different kind of pain. Your body needed to feel some pain, to keep you grounded in reality, stop you just drifting away. It was the hurt of being caged, of seeing your unit hurting and not being able to fight for them, of the black fog that was your mind trying to convince your body to let go. Soon, they'd be heading into winter. The cells were as cold on Christmas Day as they were stifling on the Fourth of July. There were never enough calories that you could get any warmth from food.

When they crammed together on their pallet, five of them shoulder to shoulder, they got a little. Barely enough to survive. But enough.

"BA?" he said.

"Yeah?"

"Would you like it if I got up today?"

BA reached in, and smoothed Face's hair. "Yeah. Make me real happy."


End file.
